On occasion of the publication of What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, the Vera
List Center for Art and Politics, the Queens Museum of Art, and Creative Time present a
conversation between the book’s author Tom
Finkelpearl and contributors Brett Cook,
Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Pedro Lasch, and Ernesto Pujol. Together, they examine the activist, participatory,
coauthored aesthetic experiences of contemporary art.

In What We Made, Finkelpearl suggests social
cooperation as a meaningful way to think about collaborative work and provides
a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of
fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working
cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields—including
social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues
discussed in the book include the experience of working in public, working with
museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between
education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities available with new
media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. What We Made is published by Duke University Press.

Participants include:

Brett Cook, artist

Wendy Ewald, artist

Sondra Farganis, Founding Director, Vera List Center of Art and Politics, The New School

Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art

Carin Kuoni, Director/Curator, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School